'He Liked Having A Murderer For A Father. It Gave Him Status. It Made People Fear Him'
In part 22 of Good Guys Lost, feral gangs roam the streets and nobody's secrets are safe in a world where phone-hacking is rampant
Read part 21 of Good Guys Lost here
EVEN BEFORE JULIE was crowned Charisma winner, it was inevitable that Billy would be caught up in the wave of publicity. Earlier in the series, the girl had confided in her mentor that she had not seen her natural father since she was a child. Missy immediately passed on the information to her national scandal-sheet contact. By the time the contest reached its semi-finals, a local newspaper was keen to claim proprietorial rights to the potential star. An estranged father was collateral damage in the quest for publicity.
It wasn’t the biggest story. The News of the World ran it across pages 22 and 23 on a spread heavy with advertising. ‘Charisma girl’s dead-beat dad wanted to be pop star,’ the headline said. There was a hastily snapped picture of Billy but it was blurry and furtive. The piece was a hatchet job. “… deserted young family… jailed for beating up stepfather… failed rock career…” It was hugely embarrassing and set back Billy’s recovery.
Public sympathy swung behind Julie. On the following Saturday night her phone votes spiked. It was the highest volume of texts in the season. All at £1 per vote. The girl’s down-to-earth nature, her residual niceness and unthreatening low-key attractiveness made the nation take her to its bosom. Your father may not have loved you, but we do, the voters said. Her co-competitors were appalled. Cinderella had suddenly become a threat. The producers led the contestants to believe sass and swagger would win the day. Mr Charisma himself was dumbfounded. He began plotting out a career for Julie, much to Missy’s amusement.
In Liverpool, Kevin Moran read the story. It made him angry. He had grown up hearing about how wonderful his father was, how Duke had been a stand-up guy. Wellwishers had told the boy about how his dad took responsibility and went to jail for his mates. The tales were meant to illustrate Duke’s character but his son was never able to grasp the context. All he could see is that two other people ran away and left his parent to stew in prison. He could never comprehend why everyone – even his mother – was so well disposed towards Billy. Why, he often speculated, didn’t the actual killer hold up his hands and accept the blame? To him, he was Billy the Bastard, the man who stole his father. The resentment festered throughout his teenage years and into his early 20s.
He liked having a murderer for a father. It gave him status. It made people fear him. It was one of the key reasons Kevin’s little mob of wannabe gangsters gathered around him. They were all younger than him – his contemporaries had seen through his bluster long ago – and lived in Dovecot, just across East Prescot Road from the Moran house. The 16 and 17-year-olds in his crew were feral. They had been born on the other side of the great watershed in British society and grown up in the post-Thatcher world where the bonds of community had been stretched to the point where they began to fray. They cared nothing for politics. Their ambitions were to gather quick, ugly wealth by whatever means possible.
The older hard-cases around town laughed at Kevin Moran. He was ‘King of the Kids’ and it was only in deference to his father’s memory that the bouncers on the doors showed him the bare minimum of respect. When he heard someone call him ‘the King,’ he took it in its most unironic sense and adopted it. The kids fell into line and used the nickname but it soon morphed into the less grandiose ‘Kingy’. The teenagers aspired to be like him and Kevin’s court was populated by retainers who were amoral and irrationally violent. They dabbled in drugs and sparred with equally unprincipled youths from Page Moss. Dovey Edz and Mossy Edz were at war and the tit-for-tat attacks were growing more dangerous by the month. Kingy imagined himself a godfather, the heir to an empire that was destroyed when his dad went to jail. He was determined to become one of the city’s most feared gangsters and make all his enemies shake with terror.
It was Kevin who was shaking as the Charisma publicity unfolded. He stared at the local newspaper and felt hate surge through him. There must be something he could do, he thought, to make Billy the Bastard and his bitch of a daughter suffer.
*
If you don’t want to wait for the next extracts, the paperback is available here
“Now you’re a star you can do anything,” Missy said over a glass of champagne at the Charisma final afterparty. She looked Julie, the show’s winner, in the eye. “Men can’t grab your pussy any more. If you fancy them, grab their cock. They’ll queue up to fuck you. You become a hundred times more fanciable when you’re famous. Live out all your fantasies.”
Now in her early 40s, Missy’s carnal appetite was increasing. The wild antics of the 1980s had been largely traditional rock’n’roll behaviour with all the usual twists: bondage, S&M, group sex. These activities were fuelled by drugs and drink and were relatively harmless.
When she began putting groups together things took another twist. Power and control turned her on. The young boys who auditioned were fair game for sexual bullying. She would demand the desperate wanabees drop their trousers. She particularly enjoyed trying to tease erections out of young gay men. “Look at your little acorn,” she would say, plucking at the victim’s hapless penis. “Isn’t it going to grow into a big oak so you can stick it into mommy?” She would make straight boys kiss each other for her pleasure and, when the mood took her, would make use of her casting couch. Few men in the industry were more predatory than Missy. She was determined to be sleazier than the sleaziest male.
There was no sense of sisterhood. When fame-hungry young songstresses came in front of her, the starmaker would humiliate them as part of the process of readying them for a life in showbusiness. Any poor girls who were a pound or two overweight would have their flesh pinched painfully. They would be stripped off and made to stand on scales while Missy grasped a handful of pubic hair and yanked it hard. “Shave it, fatso, No one wants to see your welcome mat.” The older woman relished the sexual bullying. It turned her on. “I’ve got bigger balls than any man,” she would say. And she was acting like the worst sort of macho executive.
Inside the industry people talked. The rumours were never going to make it into the Sunday papers, though. Too many tabloid reporters had enjoyed the benefits of Missy’s information. She kept the best stories, the ones that could not have her fingerprints anywhere near, for the News of the World but she was always careful to spread the largesse about. She made sure she had friends on the showbiz desks of every newspaper. The coverage of her was sycophantic and helped cement the image of the talent-show judge as the kindly auntie of British television. The youngsters she humiliated and abused were cowed by her popularity. The Labour government, still suffering from the ‘Cool Britannia’ delusion, appointed her OBE. Missy’s rise and rise seemed inexorable. Proposals for game shows and chat shows landed on her desk and publishers queued up to offer her the chance to write an autobiography. She felt invulnerable.
*
“Something’s come in that might interest you,” the voice on the other end of the phone said. The call was from a reporter. “It’s about your winner.”
Missy waited. What could Julie have done? Drink? Drugs? A resentful boyfriend with naked photos or even a sex tape? “Go on,” she said.
“It’s her old man.” The woman almost laughed.
“What’s he done? Had an affair? Been caught cottaging?” She chuckled. “This is what you’re down to? You’ve got to do better than this.”
“No, it’s a good tale. It’s not the man she calls dad. It’s her real father. It’s the one who deserted the family.”
“Go on.”
“Some piece of shit from Liverpool says that dear old pater killed a man. But that’s not all. The kid claims that your Julie’s real father framed his dad for the murder.”
It was true. The King of the Kids had brooded for weeks about Julie’s success. One night he was watching a TV programme about kiss-and-tells and he was struck by a thought. Perhaps that would be a way he could hit back.
On Sunday, he bought all the papers. He scoured the pages and found what he was looking for. A little box that said: “Have you got a story? Call the newsdesk on…”
The first number he tried picked up. He gave a very brief synopsis, left contact details and waited. The next day he received a call. The man was interested. “I want five grand,” Kevin said. The journalist snorted.
“Take it elsewhere. Good luck.”
“No, wait,” he said desperately. “What can you pay?”
“A grand.”
After a moment of wavering, he cracked. “OK.”
“And it needs to stack up. No proof, no money.”
Kingy was worried. He could not imagine how to furnish evidence. The reporter was confident. The newspaperman knew how he could stand this up. A couple of calls would get the ball rolling. First, he wanted to make sure Missy was onside.
*
Missy hung up. She thought for a moment or two and then made a call. The News of the World reporter picked up after a single ring. “One of your rivals has a good tale about one of my girls,” she said. “She’s in the studio this afternoon. I’ll leave a message on her voicemail about the call I’ve just taken and ask her to ring me back. I’ll tell her I’m on a train and to leave a message. Then, at 8pm tonight I’ll ring her and talk to her. You know what to do.”
He did. It was a simple matter of hacking the voicemails. Most people did not change the default access code on their remote message system. As long as he had Julie’s number he could listen to her messages. Missy made sure she was hacked, too. If the scam was ever exposed she could claim she was a victim.
Fame had not been everything that Julie expected. Like most people, she wanted the benefits but struggled with the downsides. Anonymity has its positives and sometimes she yearned for the pre-Charisma era. Days were now regimented. She was ushered from studios to personal appearances. The trappings of wealth and success surrounded the girl but the effects did not filter through to her bank account. The long-term contract she had signed generated cash for the Charisma conglomerate and required her to sing other people’s songs. Effectively she was on a wage. It was a good stipend but she noted with some concern that the previous year’s winner had already dropped from public view. None of this was how she imagined it.
Instinctively, she was aware that this could be a fleeting experience. At the moment it felt gruelling. She did not want it to end but it could not continue this way. Being recognised everywhere was intrusive. Everything she had dreamt about had happened. She was unprepared for the change. Events left her disoriented. It was like being transplanted into an alien world. The culture shock left her bewildered.
The phone call made things worse. Two different newspapers had called the company’s PR people with allegations that her father – not the person she considered her real dad but the biological one – had murdered a man and framed someone else for the crime. The accusations had the ring of truth. Over the years her mother had made a number of suggestions that her natural father was a violent thug who consorted with hoodlums. She was terrified of telling her mum. Suddenly old wounds were being torn apart. None of this would have happened if she had not entered the stupid competition.
There was only one person to turn to: Missy. Her mentor left a message shortly after the PR people dropped the bombshell. Julie called back, as requested, and poured her heart out into the void of Missy’s voicemail. Finally, the two women spoke. Missy had just one piece of advice. She suggested that it was worth Julie talking to one of the reporters. He was a friend – “if leeches can ever be friends,” Missy said – and it would at least allow the girl to frame the story on her own terms. Julie flinched at the thought of the headline: “My father the killer.”
After putting the phone down she wept for an hour. Then, gathering all her strength, she called home and relayed the situation to her mother. “That cunt,” Julie’s mum said with feeling. It was a word she never used. “Will we ever be rid of him?”
*
Back in Liverpool, Billy was beginning to get his life back together. The embarrassment of seeing his estranged daughter become a ubiquitous presence on television and in the newspapers had faded. If he had learnt anything in his fifty-odd years it was that you get used to anything.
He had even begun to feel small stirrings of pride. After the initial shock it was nice to see his child, even if it was only in the media. She looked so much like his mother and the voice, for all its flaws, reminded him of his grandma. It was untutored and, at times, toneless but it evoked Burlington Street in another age. It was a bizarre feeling. Completely irrational.
The sight of Missy dredged up different emotions. It healed him in a sense. For more than two decades the idea of his lost love acted like an anchor on his happiness. He thought about her numerous times a day. The guilt that a more rational man might have felt for taking a life was alchemised into a sense of grief for his own loss. The dead man’s desperate, gurgling face did not haunt his dreams; a soft, desperate craving stalked his nights. In sleep he held an idealised image of his perfect woman. On waking he felt a yearning that he could not shake. Until, that is, the bitch used his daughter to gain some sort of sick revenge.
It meant that he looked at his wife with fresh eyes. Suddenly, she was no longer second best. Yes, the spectre of Julie caused tension in the marriage but things were settling down. That was until a cameraman loosed off a series of photographs with his motordrive as Billy emerged from work one Thursday afternoon. It might as well have been shots from a machinegun rather than a camera.
Later that night a reporter knocked at the house and gave a brief outline of the story the paper would be running on Sunday. Billy slammed the door but the man continued to shout through the letterbox. That is what caused him to snap. He went to his toolbox under the stairs and took out a hammer. Shrugging off his screaming wife, he opened the front door and hurtled down the path. Luckily, the reporter was young, impervious to embarrassment and quick on his feet. The newspaperman fled down the street at speed. Unfortunately the photographer was stationed across the road. The paper had the money shot.
*
With his £1,000, Kingy had a party with his crew. They smoked weed, drank sweet, sugary alchopops and vodka and talked about killing the Page Moss Edz. Then their leader showed them his pride and joy. It was a battered Smith & Wesson .455 revolver and a handful of bullets. It was nearly 100 years old and he had spent almost half of his newspaper cheque on it, paying the cash to a drug dealer in town, a man who had got his first break in the business of crime from Duke two decades earlier. Now he could not wait to use it. The pistol would give the Dovey Edz the edge in their ongoing war with their rivals.
*
Missy’s assistant delivered the stack of Sunday papers. The tabloid that had originally brought the story to her had gone big on it. Billy, waving a hammer, rushed out of the front page. ‘Charisma star’s ‘killer’ dad runs wild,’ the headline said. ‘Hammer wielding maniac framed mate for murder,’ the subhead claimed. A small, circular picture of a pensive Julie completed the package.
Inside, the interview with my cousin laid down the allegations. The paper went hard on the accusations. Too hard. They knew too much. They had, of course, hacked Missy, Julie, Billy and, even, me. Kingy had supplied the numbers of friends and family that might have got a call from Billy. There were a dozen people he could have got my contact details from.
I was on a plane so Billy left a long, rambling message. “Call me when you get this. A paper’s running a story about the Divvy, saying I set Duke up. Your mam will probably be mentioned. How can we stop it? Do you know anyone who can stop it? That little twat Kevin’s sold us out. His dad will be turning in his grave. The cunt deserved to die. We don’t deserve this.”
After hearing this, and other messages, the red-top editors knew they were on safe ground.
It was a satisfying read for Missy. Now she turned to the News of the World to see how they approached the tale. Julie’s involvement would ensure she got a sympathetic ear from the paper. Her picture was on the front page with a small headline. ‘Star shocked by killer dad’s past.’
Missy opened to the spread and ran a practiced eye over the pages. There was no need to read the copy. Poor deserted girl shamed by dead-beat killer dad. Yet something bothered her. She looked harder at the package.
It took a moment to realise what unnerved her. Julie had provided the wedding picture in exchange for the promise of an even easier ride. It was the photograph with me in it. Missy stared at the gawky 17-year-old groom and there was a germ of recognition. I’ve seen something, she thought. Her glance flicked across the other photos and she froze. The picture department had rooted out an amateurish publicity picture from the Scouse Pie years. This time Julie’s father had long hair and she recognised him instantly. A numbness spread across her mind. It was him. Him. It suddenly became clear. The girl, Julie, was the image of her parent. What Missy had seen in those auditions was not talent. It was something else.
She had barely thought of him over the years except as a touchstone for her contempt for men. His features quickly faded from her memory. They had posed for a few polaroid snapshots during their relationship but she had thrown them away within a month of his disappearance. The face, the body, the walk, his smell, had dissolved in her mind and only a residual anger remained. Now everything came flooding back.
Had the girl and her father plotted together to humiliate and destroy her? Then she thought rationally. They were the people hurt by this story. Missy did not know what to think. For the first time in years she felt helpless and lost.
Next: Another murder shocks the nation